Wampum

I've been hearing anecdotes of the massive problems regarding verifying the Texas caucus results from two weeks ago, but never saw anything put the whole thing together. Today, a diary at MyDD did just that. The gist of the matter is that less than half of Texas precincts have produced their caucus sign-in sheets, and for those that did, there appear to be some significant problems.

In Texas, Democratic Party caucuses are done with sign-in sheets as a verifiable paper trail for deciding the proportion of delegates to be awarded to each candidate for President. That is, each attendee signs in and identifies who they are representing in writing. There is no provision for 'hand counts' or other methods of counting votes for delegates. All caucus attendees are required to prove that they voted in the primary in order to be included in the final count. If for any reason an attendee does not have their voter registration card with them, the voting rolls from the early vote and the on-the-day vote are available to precinct workers to refer to prior to allowing an attendee to sign in as an eligible attendee.

For the last 2 weeks, there have been a multitude of reports of misbehavior, sloppy math (when determining final caucus totals), people who attended -- and voted -- in the caucuses who were not even registered to vote (some of these were even selected as delegates) and more and more and more.

The Texas Democratic Party -- at a minimum -- is supposed to 1) verify that the caucus attendees were registered voters, 2) determine that the math was done correctly and 3) provide lists of (at least their own) delegates to each campaign. The TDP has been so overwhelmed, both with the numbers of attendees to check and the size and frequency of the problems, that they say they cannot accomplish these tasks prior to the scheduled County/State Senatorial Conventions on March 29.

The Clinton campaign has written to the Texas Democratic Party asking the state/county conventions be delayed until the votes are verified; since such a mess could equally benefit Obama's final tallies, I suspect (would hope) his campaign will join in the call. Like Florida and Michigan, this is an issue which goes to the core of being Democrats -- counting every vote.